Brooke POV

Ethan slammed his palm against the partition so hard the glass rattled in its frame.

"Stop the car," he barked.

The driver, a massive man named Luca who had been with the Spencers since before I was born, slammed on the brakes. The SUV lurched to a violent halt in the middle of the highway.

Ethan was gripping his phone so tightly his knuckles turned white. He wasn't looking at me. He was entirely focused on the voice on the other end, his jaw working as he ground his teeth.

"Calm down," he said into the phone, his voice tight with controlled fury. "Don't do anything stupid, Kylie. Put the pills down."

My stomach turned. Suicide baiting. The oldest trick in the book for a girl who needed to be the center of the universe.

"She's threatening to call her uncle," Ethan said, speaking more to himself than to me. "She's saying she's going to tell him about the shipment coming in at the docks if I don't come over. She's hysterical."

He looked at me then. Really looked at me.

"I have to go to her," he said.

It wasn't a question.

"You're leaving me," I said, my voice hollow. "On our anniversary. After she threw wine on me. To go comfort her because she's throwing a tantrum?"

"She's a liability, Brooke," he snapped. "If she talks, the Feds raid the warehouse. We lose millions. People go to prison. This is business."

He shoved his door open.

"Get in the front," he ordered.

"Excuse me?"

"Luca needs to stay with the security detail. You drive. I can't have a driver hear what she might say. She's loose-lipped. You're my wife. You're safe."

Safe. The word tasted like ash on my tongue. I wasn't a wife. I was a vault for his secrets and a chauffeur for his mistress.

I didn't move.

"Brooke," he growled. "Now."

I got out of the car. The night air was biting. I climbed into the driver's seat of the massive SUV, my hands shaking on the steering wheel. Ethan got in the back.

"Drive to the Holland estate."

I drove. I drove the man I loved to the woman who wanted to destroy me.

When we pulled up to the wrought-iron gates of the Holland mansion, Kylie was waiting on the steps. She wasn't holding pills. She was holding a bottle of vodka, looking perfectly fine, just beautifully tragic in the moonlight.

Ethan jumped out before the car even stopped completely.

"Kylie!"

She ran to him. She threw herself into his arms, wrapping her legs around his waist. He caught her. He held her. He buried his face in her neck, whispering things I couldn't hear but could feel in the marrow of my bones.

He wasn't pushing her away. He wasn't scolding her for threatening the family business. He was holding her like she was the only fragile thing in the world.

I sat in the front seat, watching them through the rearview mirror. I was the invisible woman. The staff.

After a long minute, Ethan led her toward the car.

"She's coming with us," he said as he opened the back door. "I need to get her to the safe house at Lake Villa. She needs to detox."

Kylie slid into the back seat, smelling of liquor and triumph. She saw me in the mirror and smirked.

"Thanks for the ride, Brooke," she slurred.

Ethan got in beside her. He pulled her head onto his shoulder, stroking her hair.

"Just drive, Brooke," he said softly.

I drove them to the lake house. It took forty minutes.

Forty minutes of listening to Kylie whimper and Ethan comfort her.

Forty minutes of him promising her he would fix everything.

Forty minutes of realizing that the contract marriage wasn't just a business deal for him. It was a waiting room until he could figure out how to be with her.

When we arrived, the Holland family guards were waiting. They took Kylie from Ethan with deferential nods. They ignored me completely.

Ethan stood by the open door of the SUV, looking down at me.

"I have to stay," he said. "To manage the situation. Make sure she doesn't talk."

I gripped the steering wheel until my fingers hurt.

"You're not coming home?" I asked.

"I can't."

He tapped the roof of the car.

"Take the SUV. Luca will meet you at the apartment. Go home, Brooke."

He turned and walked into the house with her. The door closed, shutting out the light, shutting out the warmth, shutting me out of his life.

I put the car in gear and drove away. I didn't cry. I was done crying.

As the tires crunched over the gravel, I realized something terrifying.

I hated him.

Brooke POV

The drive back to the city blurred into a streak of neon lights and ancient ghosts.

My phone sat on the passenger seat, screen dark and silent. No apology text. No checking in to see if his wife had made it home safely through the rain. There was just the low hum of the engine and the crushing weight of five wasted years pressing down on my chest.

As I passed the industrial district, the scent of sulfur and wet wool assaulted me, cutting through even the filtered air of the luxury SUV.

It was the smell of my childhood. Acrid. Inescapable.

I remembered the day the foreman came to our peeling door, holding a settlement check in one hand and a non-disclosure agreement in the other. My mother sat at the kitchen table, her right hand a bandaged, bloody ruin, staring blankly at the wall.

The Spencer family paid well for silence.

That money bought us a small house away from the smog. It bought me a scholarship to the prep school where the children of the city's elite learned the fine arts of laundering money and destroying souls.

That was where I met them.

Ethan Spencer was the dark prince of the school-brooding, untouchable, and beautiful. And Kylie Holland was his designated queen.

I was the charity case. The girl whose clothes were always a season behind, whose mother had a hook for a hand. Kylie made sure the world never let me forget it. She would trip me in the corridors, spill lunch on my library books, and whisper that I smelled like factory smoke.

Ethan never joined in.

Once, in sophomore year, he found me crying in the locker room after Kylie had taken scissors to my gym uniform. He didn't speak. He just handed me his varsity jacket, heavy and warm, and stood guard at the door until I stopped shaking.

That single, small act of kindness became the seed of my destruction. I watered it with hope for years.

I became a narrative designer for the Spencer family's legitimate gaming front because I wanted to be useful to him. I wanted to show him I was more than just a charity case. I wrote stories where the hero always saved the girl.

God, what a joke.

I pulled the SUV into the underground garage of our penthouse building. The silence of the apartment was deafening when I walked in. It felt less like a home and more like a museum-cold, pristine, and dead.

I wandered into Ethan's study. It smelled of mahogany and the expensive cigars he smoked only when the stress of the Family became too much.

I sat in his leather chair, the material still holding the faint impression of his body.

I remembered our wedding day. It was supposed to be Ethan and Kylie. But she had run off with a club promoter two days before the ceremony-a massive, public insult to the Spencer name.

The Don, Ethan's father, was furious. He needed a wedding to secure a territory merger. He needed a bride who was docile, indebted, and clean.

He looked at me. The catering girl. The daughter of the woman they had maimed.

Ethan had proposed to me in the kitchen of the banquet hall, his face carved from stone.

Marry me, Brooke. Five years. We take care of your mother for life. You get five million when you leave. Just play the part.

I said yes because I loved him. I was foolish enough to think five years would be enough to make him love me back.

I pulled open the top drawer of his desk. There, hidden beneath a stack of merger files, sat a velvet box.

My heart stuttered. Had he remembered? Was this an anniversary gift he hadn't had a chance to give me tonight?

I opened it.

It was a diamond necklace. Heavy, gaudy, and utterly tasteless.

And there was a note.

"For K. I'll make it up to you."

The air left my lungs.

It wasn't for me. It was an apology gift for Kylie. He had bought it days ago. He had been planning to apologize to his mistress for the inconvenience of being married to me on our anniversary.

I snapped the box shut. The sound cracked like a gunshot in the quiet room.

The memory of six months ago clawed its way up from the depths of my mind. I had walked past this study and heard him talking to his Consigliere, Marcus.

"She's just a placeholder, Marcus. A cheap placeholder until Kylie gets her head out of her ass. She's convenient. She doesn't ask questions. She's nothing."

I had pretended I didn't hear it. I had cooked him dinner that night and asked about his day, swallowing the glass in my throat.

I stood up, the chair scraping violently against the floor.

The illusion was gone. The hope was dead. The girl who loved the boy who gave her a jacket was gone.

I walked to the closet in the hallway and pulled out a suitcase.

I wasn't going to wait for the five years to be up. I wasn't going to wait for him to discard me like a used pawn.

I was going to burn the contract to the ground.

Brooke POV

The next morning, the penthouse felt less like a home and more like a gilded cage I had foolishly forgotten to lock.

I was in the middle of packing-just my clothes, nothing he had ever bought me-when the front door beeped.

Ethan walked in. He looked like absolute hell.

His shirt was rumpled, his eyes bloodshot and heavy. He reeked of stale scotch and the cloying sweetness of Kylie's perfume.

He stopped dead when he saw the suitcase on the living room floor.

"Going on a trip?" he asked, bypassing me to reach the kitchen.

"I'm leaving, Ethan," I said, my hands steady as I folded a sweater.

He downed a glass of water in one long gulp and slammed it onto the marble counter.

"Don't be dramatic, Brooke. I had a long night. Kylie was... difficult."

I didn't answer. I just kept packing.

He turned around, leaning against the counter and crossing his arms. The movement strained the fine fabric of his shirt against his biceps. He was used to being looked at. He was used to being obeyed.

"Put the bag away," he said, his voice dropping an octave. "We have a schedule."

I laughed. It was a dry, brittle sound that scraped my throat.

"A schedule? Is that what you call it?"

"My father is coming over for dinner on Sunday," he stated flatly. "We need to discuss the pre-nup renewal. The lawyers found a loophole regarding the payout. If you leave early, you get nothing. Zero. And your mother's medical care gets cut off immediately."

He played the card. The only card that mattered.

He watched my face, waiting for the fear to set in. Waiting for the submission.

But I wasn't afraid anymore. I had secretly audited my mother's accounts weeks ago. I had been siphoning my salary from the gaming division for three years. I had enough to move her to a private facility in Oregon. I didn't need his blood money.

"I don't care about the money, Ethan."

He narrowed his eyes. "You're bluffing. You have nowhere to go."

He walked over and kicked the suitcase shut with the toe of his shoe.

"Get dressed. We're going out."

"Excuse me?"

"Kylie is throwing a 'reconciliation' party at her penthouse tonight," he said, sounding bored. "To apologize to the family for the scene at the gala. She invited us."

"You want me to go to a party hosted by the woman who threw wine on me yesterday?"

Ethan ran a hand through his messy hair, looking annoyed that I was making this difficult.

"It's about unity, Brooke. If we don't go, it looks like there's a rift. It makes us look weak to the rival families. You just have to stand there, smile, and drink a martini. It's what you're good at."

What I'm good at.

Standing. Smiling. Being a prop.

I looked at him-really looked at him. I saw the arrogance, the blindness. He didn't see a person. He saw a narrative asset.

"Fine," I said, my voice hollow. "I'll go."

He relaxed, thinking he had won. "Good girl. Wear the red dress. The one I bought you last Christmas. It matches the tie I'm wearing."

He walked into the bedroom to shower, stripping off his shirt as he went.

I waited until the water turned on. Then, I followed him into the bedroom.

I went to the back of his closet, to the high shelf where he kept his seasonal gear. I reached behind a stack of sweaters and pulled out a small, dusty wooden box.

Inside was a watch. I had designed the face myself, sketching the gears, the intricate layout late into the night. I had it custom-made in Switzerland. It had taken six months of coordination.

I had given it to him for his birthday three years ago.

It was still in the box. The cheap plastic protector was still peeling off the glass. He had never even wound it.

Next to it was a first edition of The Great Gatsby, his favorite book. Unopened. The spine hadn't even been cracked.

A cashmere scarf I knitted. Unworn.

He hadn't just rejected my love; he hadn't even bothered to acknowledge its existence.

I put the box back into the darkness.

I put on the red dress. It fit like a second skin, hugging my curves, the slit riding high up my thigh. I applied my makeup like war paint. Sharp, winged eyeliner. Blood-red lipstick.

When I walked out, Ethan was waiting. He looked me up and down, his eyes dark with possession.

"Perfect," he said. "You look like a Spencer."

No, Ethan, I thought as I grabbed my purse.

I look like a widow.